How to Love Past Reason
May 29, 2026
A Sunday morning, and the city streets are still half asleep, lulled by the breeze. I am walking with a friend in a neighborhood new to me. An older woman calls good morning from her porch, where she has settled with a cigarette, vice on the Lord’s Day. She looks chill; I think Jesus would approve.
She has a visitor, but he is below the porch in her bit of yard, since he uses a wheelchair and cannot navigate the steps. His legs are gone; he does not trouble to hide the stumps with the usual blanket. Instead he begins shouting that he is crazy, that he is a Marine. “I killed for a living,” he yells, more to shock than to confess.
I nod, accepting this, not sure what words to pour on top.
Easing him away from his rant, the woman introduces herself as Vanessa Harper. We exchange a few pleasantries. Then the two friends slide into a private conversation so old, the skids are greased. At periodic intervals, he accuses Harper of reinvention: “You lie!”
“No I ain’t, Bugs Bunny!”
He grins at the nickname, and those few seconds of tension snap. We chat a little longer—politics, the weather, whatever. Something is keeping me on this sidewalk, even at the risk of intrusion, and I am not sure what it is, but I am not ready to leave yet. More talk, idle and content, punctuated by a few odd bursts of rage Harper manages to snuff out every time. He does not scare her. And her affection lightens his pain. At one point, smack in the middle of a very different topic, he breaks off abruptly, nods toward her, and says, his hoarse voice softened by sadness, “I loved her, but she didn’t love me.”
This fires my imagination. An old crush, formed when they were kids? A doomed affair? A letter after he went off to war? Whatever happened, they have survived the storm of passion and the ravages that followed. They are easy together. And Bugs’s (I never got his real name) loss of mental composure does not faze Harper one bit. She is giving him back a different sort of love, these days.
A minute later, he starts railing again, cheerfully profane. She shushes him and warns, “These are church people.”
“Oh, no. No, we’re not,” I say quickly.
She smiles. “I’m just trying to get him to be quiet.”
As we say goodbye, they resume their banter. These two are enjoying each other. Harper has not frozen into the stiff, careful mode many of us take when dealing with anyone with dementia or any other mental illness. The rambling weirdness of an inner life, spoken or yelled without regard for sense or custom, unnerves us. We distance, holding the person at arm’s length. Farther, if we can.
I am guiltiest of all: the thought of unchecked, uncheckable rage terrifies me. So does the prospect of trying to reason with someone whose mind is far from rational. All my life, I have leaned hard on reason and rationalization, letting calm mental calculus steer me through emotion and catastrophe. Without that tool? In all my fancy education, I never managed to learn how to handle other people’s strong emotions, be they anger or bitter sorrow, a thirst for revenge or a lust for blood or power.
There should be a course in eighth grade: how to contain someone else’s turbulence, not feed it or collapse with its force.
Even calmer rambles alarm me, because I have no idea how to respond. Expert caregivers who deal with people who have some form of dementia often advise you to enter into that person’s world, share the delusion rather than trying (impossible!) to argue it away. I love the imaginative acceptance of this approach, but how awkward it feels in practice, and how false.
Vanessa Harper did not enter Bugs Bunny’s world. She kept her own reality and her own counsel. But she accepted him. A subtle distinction: she did not accept the terms of his reality, but she accepted that it was his reality, and she did not try to argue it away.
Something I will never stop regretting: when my mom was near death and living with us, she began to see things. People, usually, floating up by the ceiling or through the window. She was not troubled by this; she marveled at it. But me, I panicked. I was going to lose my mother before I lost her for good. She was sailing into dementia, I decided (all on my own, without benefit of medical advice). I did not think about her compromised, scarred lungs making her heart work too hard, thus sending less oxygen to her brain. I did not stop to comfort myself with her enduring wit, insight, and sharpness. I catastrophized. Any minute now, she would forget who I was. I would no longer be able to check with her, learn what she wanted. We would not be able to share memories and hopes ever again. Almost six decades of loving, near-daily conversation would be undone.
“Don’t you dare,” I told her, trying for a light, teasing tone and failing. “You can’t lose it! I can handle anything but that.”
She met my eyes, gave me a nod, and straightened, which is tough to do in a recliner, yet the change in posture was obvious. I could see the physical effort she was making, and I could imagine the mental effort behind it. Not once, after that, did she spin off into that dreamy half-world where I could not follow. Sheer force of will shot oxygen to her brain, and the people fell from the ceiling.
But she had been happy in that gauzy twilight. I had yanked her back to a hot, glaring reality and demanded that she exert constant effort to stay alert, like an exhausted swimmer who cannot stop treading water. Would it have destroyed me to watch her end her life more softly, tossing reason aside? For childish ego’s sake, I kept her in my world, because I was scared I could not love her properly in hers.
Vanessa Harper loved Bugs Bunny the right way. Maybe not with the passion he once demanded, but far better than I could.
